What did you do in KSP1 today?

[Sharpy]

11 minutes ago, XB-70A said:

Tried to make a new full stock medium/heavy S.S.T.O. in what I called Project Talos :

But it's another failure by far. It's easy to handle, pretty stable during the climb with its T-tail and there is enough fuel for orbiting to 200 x 200. Just the center of thrust is so shifted the craft can't complete the circularization. Even with just two R.A.P.I.E.R. engaged it will rise its nose crazily if I go over 40-45% of thrust.

It seems a third engine (even a stupid Thud) hidden in the cargo bay would do the job. There's a dead zone of the cargo ramp, where you can't put any meaningful payload, and with the ramp lowered the ceiling remains higher than normal roof of the cargo bay. It's perfect for that kind of "attachments". (of course opening the cargo ramp in space is somewhat "uncool"... though you don't have to make it gape all the way - "deploy limit" is settable on the fly, so just open it a notch to let the exhaust out.

Edited September 7, 2016 by Sharpy

[eddiew]

Completed a 100km round trip in a rover! Fortunately whatever kraken I had awoken this morning had gone by the time I got home and started up KSP again, and neither the Investigator or the Ranger Rover was floating in the blue void of doom.

The morning sun found Thystle Kerman and Leo Kerman raring to resume their ascent up the volcano they have christened Mount Steepy McSteepface. The climb was a little challenging, but kicking the Ranger Rover into 4 wheel drive quickly solved all power problems, and the reaction wheels (hotkeyed to only supply torque when SAS is active) were more than enough to hold attitude over the bumps or flip the rover back onto its wheels when it landed on its roof.

Seeking out the highest point, the exploratory duo planted a flag at 5888m. Then realised the next peak was over 6100m, but couldn't be bothered going back for the flag so they just falsified the numbers in their log books. Looking for maximum science efficiency, one copy of the data is radioed home, while each kerbonaut took their own copy. Thystle returned hers to the lab on the Investigator for immediate processing, while Leo stores his in the cockpit to take back to KSC.

With the sun already past its zenith, the crew board the Investigator and chill out for the rest of the day. Well, except for River Kerman and Nimoy Kerman, who are hard at work in the lab generating 5 science per hour.

Tomorrow, Ollie Kerman shall take Leo's place as the rover scientist as it heads for Rald's canyons. Engineer Thystle hopes he is a safer driver than Leo.

6 hours ago, capi3101 said:

I should start taking screenies again.

Aye  

[XB-70A]

4 hours ago, Sharpy said:

It seems a third engine (even a stupid Thud) hidden in the cargo bay would do the job. There's a dead zone of the cargo ramp, where you can't put any meaningful payload, and with the ramp lowered the ceiling remains higher than normal roof of the cargo bay. It's perfect for that kind of "attachments". (of course opening the cargo ramp in space is somewhat "uncool"... though you don't have to make it gape all the way - "deploy limit" is settable on the fly, so just open it a notch to let the exhaust out.

 

Thanks for the helps Sharpy. In fact this spacecraft was a try to make a "cheap" version of a more complete one with a duo of NERVs which was supposed to reach Duna with a small rover :

 

I think I will stop with the rear ramp as it's finally totally useless for a LKO transfert-only craft. And will probably start a new one, just keeping the wing, their nacelles and the T-tail. The cargo bay will be directly linked to the cockpit, the fuel stored in the rear section and probably one/two weak rocket engine placed in a more traditional fuselage end.

[eddiew]

Rald's great rift valley turned out to be... quite scary. Had to travel 75km from the Investigator, so an early start was warranted.

...possibly too early. The low sun made it really hard to spot changes in the terrain and many flips happened. By the time Thystle and Ollie reached the valley, it was still only mid morning.

Going down wasn't really so hard; yes, a lot of that slope is over 45 degrees, but the Ranger Rover is as wide as it is long and for the most part went in the direction its wheels were aimed.

Getting out on the other hand...

Yes, if those ruggedized wheels were any ruggeder, they'd be wearing kilts and swigging from bottles of vodka.

(Ok, yes, it took a few simulations to get out of that valley, but Thystle found a route in the end. Not once did the tyres burst. Never doubt the engineer's word.)

[Papa_Joe]

I revived codepoet's mod PWB Fuel Balancer.  Now KSP 1.1.3 compatible.

[KerrMü]

Karlenna and Valjorie were very proud of making the first landing on our new Beagle Base landing platform.

First I was like "Hey, I can land a Beagle near my base and drive my mobile refinery over to get it refueled, no big deal." But then I thought "wait a minute, I have to do that every time, and refueling takes ages! There has to be a better way."

So this is what I came up with. It´s an automated mining and fuel depot with 4 drills, 1 ISRU unit and 2 orange tanks, which is enough to fill up two Beagles. Currently it´s 5km away from my base (partcount) but it´s mobile as well. Though... launching it to orbit has been a nightmare, finding a nice flat spot was difficult and landing it exactly there was hair raising and exhausting. But hey, landing on it was pretty easy . And my Mun Traktor is now free for caravaning or other important missions.

[Wabbit]

I optimized the layout and control surface sensitivity for my new "Stormwind" series of long-range multirole fighters. Now they fly like a dream, especially with fine controls.

[Fireheart318]

Started development on an Orbital Drop Fighter but the Kraken stuck me down on tandem reentry test 4. I managed to get my stupid ass grounded again, so a short video of the weirdest glitch I've ever pulled off should appear on my YT channel some time around the beginning of October.

The planes are launched into a polar orbit shuttle-style, dock in orbit, stay there until a threat is detected, and deorbited in pairs. They proved to be too unstable when docked nose-to-nose and drift to far apart or get messed up by bdarmory's autopilot, so I kept the shielded docking port nose because I might use it in the future and it works well as an aerodynamic heatshield, but  they now dock belly-to-belly using pairs of small docking ports on hydraulic detachment manifolds that are dumped in the lower atmosphere once at cruising speed. I haven't tested that yet but it should work well. See ya in October! 

Edited September 8, 2016 by Fireheart318

[Sharpy]

Continuing invasion on Minmus. Sent a few trucks, then spent way too much time struggling to have the fairings not demolish a shipment of radiators, then decided that none of the stock parts bears enough coolness to make the tanker, so I installed the MK4 part pack. This is the final piece of the puzzle. Now to assemble it.

 

BTW, she's only called "tanker" now, but I'd like to give her a more "special" name. Suggestions? Ideas?

edit:

Liquid Fuel: 35,000 units. Oxidizer: 43,000 units. For comparison, Orange Tank is 2880/3520

Edited September 8, 2016 by Sharpy

[GarrisonChisholm]

A simulation Still

I hope the above link works- the Imgur posting option I was used to seeing is no-longer present for me. (:?\

Suffice to say, the above link is to an Imgur photo of my screen during a second attempt to load my Duna Flyby craft into the KER simulation screen.  It took FOUR HOURS to go from the VAB to finally appear on the pad.  I "zoomed" out (it took over 2 minutes) to finally see the whole rocket, but after 10 minutes of 1 frame per 2 min "settling", an audible "boom" spurred me to grab my cell-phone and take this shot, as I was entirely uncertain F1 would grab a screen-shot.

The scene shows the 2300 ton rocket an "instant" (frozen, actually) after it began Rapid Unplanned Disassembly.  The issue is apparently with the Service Module.  The Supplies for the 1200 day mission are stored using a Cubic Octagonal Strut, with one pack mounted on each facing and another on each corner.  This central COS then had 8 identical COS's mated to its periphery, and then the outer ring off-set inward so as to fit inside a 2.5m shell.  This whole ring was duplicated 8 more times, meaning 225 parts were compressed to about 60% their nominal diameter and then stacked on top of each other 8 times, what with the empty fuel tank which, off-set, served as the Service Module shell, means that a 2.5m x ~8m section of the ship contained over 1800 parts.

Physics apparently does Not Like This.

The booster is a 7.5m main, and should (on paper) get 6 Kerbals, 1200+ days of supply, and 1100 return Dv into Duna orbit, however the current Supply assembly (however cleverly I may think it contrived) will need to be re-thought.  It appears my space-saving notions will not, if you'll pardon the expression, "fly".

Edited September 8, 2016 by GarrisonChisholm

[Francois424]

Okay, so not being pleased too much about my last Grand Tour ship (The one with the mining Ring that can land, that had like... 345 parts), I decided to redo it from scratch.  I had inspiration after seeing the big "Hermes Engine" from the AresExploration pack.

See, On my previous mothership, I had 8x FTmN280's (for 2240 Thrust).  So I modded the "Hermes Engine" into the FTmN2240 (Changed Ion to LF Nuclear and applied 8 times the stats of the FTmN280's, including power generation, but also HEAT Production... this thing needs 8 radiators and will blow-up if ran at full power for too long (estimation: about 5 minutes non-stop).  It's so Kerbal and I like it.  Weird that the other version with 8 smaller engines do not blow up, like ever.  I guess it must have something to do with 8 parts radiating their own heat is better than one concentrated huge source of heat.  I even managed to mod the FTmN's sound and exhaust to the Hermes Engine.  So very satisfied.

The engine section of the "Explorer I" mothership has roughly 40k LiquidFuel spread in 4 huge tanks (they attach just fine on the new long engine, aka FTmN2240). 
I also included it's own robotic control, 600 MonoPropellant, and a few ASAS to keep control.  4 RCS nozzles on the side of the tanks maintain perfect stability.
The 4 Radiators are an absolute must, and not enough by themselves for long burns.  More of them will come later.

The engine section featuring the newly developed FTmN2240 opens the door to extensive exploration... One has to be careful of overheating it tho.

 

Then I decided to redo my lander.  The old one had 191 parts alone.  This new one is more like 110, and looks better to boot. 
I went back with the Idea that the lander is the ISRU, and scrapped the idea of a small lander for Low-G worlds + Large lander for High-G worlds for ONE universal ISRU lander. 

This new one also features the main cockpit (6 kerbals pod, from the same "AresExploration" mod), a Nuclear Reactor (with only half load of Uranium since the thing is quite heavy), ISRU Refinery, 2 Trio solar panels, 4 more radiators, 2 Vector engines, 4 drills, and 8 MRS Landing Gears.  It can do 3'500 Delta-V, which should be enough for Laythe, Tylo, Slate, and Tekto... to my knowledge the worst my current install has to offer.  I can always refuel on the surface before heading out, so it's really perfect for many, many things... Including Biome hopping should I want to do that instead of Roving around (I prefer Roving).  The bay at the bottom is the usual 7 science instruments, the next thing is the Thug, and the 10m heatshield was for Laythe but I repackaged it (see later).

Both the soul and mind of the Explorer I, the lander serves both as the ship's command center, the miner and the refueller. It will now join the engine section in Orbit !

 

Assembling the whole ship in orbit went weird.  The middle section (you'll see below) was insane spaghetti and didn't want to behave at all.  I had to connect it while controlling the engine section otherwise it would wiggle all over the place !  It behaved really well once connected to both the Lander and the Engine section tho.  I can push the engine to 100% with RCS spamming away and no wiggle from the mothership... thank god;  I was worried like no tomorrow.  So the Middle section features 2 stashed 10m heatshields, a Balka solar panel (why waste the Uranium if I can keep it for the Outer Solar System), a completely optional Science Lab (for role-play reasons + I like to stash the science in there, it's also less cramped for my 2 scientists), attached to the lab you can see the Origami antenna and the Orbital Ore scanner.  Only after assembling it did I notice I will never get to use the 10m HeatShields. Well I can, but if I do I have to ditch the Balkas solar panel because it will the lack the room for it to deploy. 

Here she is, the Explorer I, in all her beauty:

Totalizing 216 parts, 537 tons and about 6,7k dV, the Explorer-Class stands ready with it's crew of 6 valiant kerbals taking one last look at their home, Kerbin. 

Edited September 9, 2016 by Francois424
much spelling

[CatastrophicFailure]

1 hour ago, GarrisonChisholm said:

I hope the above link works- the Imgur posting option I was used to seeing is no-longer present for me. (:?\

The link worked. Just copy and paste the full image address (ending in .png, etc), and hit enter, and it should automatically parse it into your post. Albums, however, are currently broken as I understand it.

1 hour ago, GarrisonChisholm said:

meaning 225 parts were compressed to about 60% their nominal diameter and then stacked on top of each other 8 times, what with the empty fuel tank which, off-set, served as the Service Module shell, means that a 2.5m x ~8m section of the ship contained over 1800 parts.

That... doesn't look nearly as insane as I was expecting....

1 hour ago, GarrisonChisholm said:

It appears my space-saving notions will not, if you'll pardon the expression, "fly".

Sure they will. In random directions, at high speed, one frame every few minutes. 

[Guest]

I've been operating Minmus Mining Network, which is now making routine fuel deliveries to Minmus Fueling Station. Everything is working well. There are only a couple of relatively minor tweaks I want to make: the rovers do need better wheels (I didn't have that node opened yet when I made them), and I'm not 100% happy with my tanker truck. I want something with more capacity (this one is just a mid-sized Rockomax) and I'd like to split payload fuel and manoeuvring fuel in the design, as it's rather fiddly to transfer back just enough fuel so I can return for another run.

To make use of that capacity, I made a heavy launch. Since Duna isn't in alignment, I decided to send Artemis Station to Eve instead. It is a fully-kitted research lab with a reusable lander (for Gilly) and a heat-shield equipped probe for dropping on Eve. No mining capacity; that may follow later. It's powered by an atomic thruster -- burns take forever but I can't argue with the specific impulse. It is now on its way to Minmus for refueling, and then it'll be on its way.

[Samniss Arandeen]

 

Remember Porco Rosso? After finding some free time today, I successfully got it on the runway at KSC. It handles reentering like a champ and can dead-stick if you get it right. I undershot and had to kick in the jet engines, then my game went slideshow mode. I broke off the lower two Whiplashes on my landing, which is pretty good considering I was getting 1 FPS.

I took some screenshots of the craft and its reentry, all viewable here: http://imgur.com/a/Fp9OG

This coming weekend I'm going to make various refinements to the design and see if I can fly some cargoes into orbit. Does anyone know the most mass-efficient way, barring seats, to get two more Kerbals aboard? I need six crew and an RC-L01 for an eventual planned mission.

[DunaRocketeer]

7 hours ago, KerrMü said:

 

 

One of the nicest designed bases I've seen in a long time.

[Sharpy]

A small thing in a break... More, "greater" things will be in the evening.

You know, I always believed the early designs with late-unlock parts could be really cool... but never really tried them.

This is the most enjoyable launch stage I've ever flown.

KER in VAB outright refuses to give any estimates, treating it as if it didn't exist.

It's so responsive I could fly loops with it.

And before I reach 15km altitude I need to shut the engine off, as both apoapsis is right, and the fairing overheats. Flying something with that kind of TWR is pure awesome.

Seriously, stick a Vector on the MK1 stack and try to fly it. Worth it.

(it's actually a delivery of a single crate of plugs and splitters from SEP to Minmus.)

Edited September 8, 2016 by Sharpy

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, Sharpy said:

Seriously, stick a Vector on the MK1 stack and try to fly it. Worth it.

Funnily enough I did just that yesterday. I was tooling around with an idea for a very light long-distance probe (Dawn propulsion) and sent it up with a light little rocket but all-modern parts. Wheeeeee!

[eddiew]

9 minutes ago, Sharpy said:

Seriously, stick a Vector on the MK1 stack and try to fly it. Worth it.

(it's actually a delivery of a single crate of plugs and splitters from SEP to Minmus.)

It's such an expensive engine to discard though   But I like that you created a rocket purely to deliver mundane electricals  

[Sharpy]

Just now, eddiew said:

It's such an expensive engine to discard though   But I like that you created a rocket purely to deliver mundane electricals  

It's just a sandbox game on a different computer, where I make craft to fly in the evening.

I'll try to edit it for recovery. The tanks will be lost, the recovered stage will consist just of the engine, fins, probe core and some parachutes/airbrakes.

Even still, with the range this thing covers on launch, it's gonna be a big loss on the distance from KSC. Unless I add half a tank to finish circularizing and perform reentry from the other side.

[eddiew]

21 minutes ago, Sharpy said:

Even still, with the range this thing covers on launch, it's gonna be a big loss on the distance from KSC. Unless I add half a tank to finish circularizing and perform reentry from the other side.

I went through a phase of doing exactly that, such that all my launchers were SSTOs with their own probe cores, torque and power   Mostly I used the Stage Recovery mod to land them because I'm lazy, but I would try to drop them at least close to KSC for ~95% returns. Works well in a career with low funds, bit pointless at 100% or sandbox mode though...

[Sharpy]

Well, the experiment was mostly successful...

It started with two more fins, another airbrake and... a heatshield. No, I didn't jettison it.

[MaxwellsDemon]

Mostly design fiddling yesterday.  My Horus Munar/Minmus vehicles seem to have been gaining a bit of weight over time as I modify them, so I had to go through and strip some of it away, restrut, and uprate some of the engines through Kerbal R&D.

[capi3101]

10 hours ago, Sharpy said:

Continuing invasion on Minmus. Sent a few trucks, then spent way too much time struggling to have the fairings not demolish a shipment of radiators, then decided that none of the stock parts bears enough coolness to make the tanker, so I installed the MK4 part pack. This is the final piece of the puzzle. Now to assemble it.

 

BTW, she's only called "tanker" now, but I'd like to give her a more "special" name. Suggestions? Ideas?

edit:

Liquid Fuel: 35,000 units. Oxidizer: 43,000 units. For comparison, Orange Tank is 2880/3520

You should give it a good, lucky spacecraft name. You know, like Titanic, or Nostromo, or Event Horizon, or Palomino, or.......or............(crap, I can't think of any other movies off the top of my head where the spaceship ultimately blows up or meets with some kind of disaster).

Didn't see the rest of you throwing out suggestions......

 

Last night began with an attempt to finish picking up some surface pressure readings in the vicinity of KSC. With all the new fandangled tech I'd unlocked recently, I decided to go ahead and build a low-tech probe rover instead of sticking Jeb back in the Bad Idea 3 so he could blow it up again. I built it on a HEKS probe core base and powered it with a Wheesley engine, using Medium landing gear for wheels. For extra measure, I threw in a pair of Thud engines on the back set to 10% thrust, the idea being to give the back a little extra grip. My mechanical horse was ultimately dubbed the Dumb Idea 7, and it was successful in its mission. Took screenies of the thing - naturally, I forgot to copy them off so I could upload them to imgur at work this morning, but maybe I'll put them up tomorrow or something.

Next up was yet another redesign of the Gurney 7 rescue ship, which replaced the Mk1 Capsule with a Mk1 Lander Can, giving me a little extra delta-V for the booster. Sent it up to rescue Laeda, yet another effin' pilot, from low Kerbin orbit. Mission was a success though I remembered during re-entry why I didn't like to couple the Mk1 Lander Can with the Small Heat Shield - it doesn't cover it up all the way. Still, the capsule survived without picking up a great deal of heat.

Last order of business for the night was the design of a plane to attempt to clear a low-altitude temperature contract north of KSC by about fifty kilometers. The Bad Idea 4 was...not entirely successful. I did clear a contract with it to test a Wheesley engine at a given speed and altitude, but the design liked to roll when it pitched. Also had to throw on canards to lift the nose enough for the stupid thing to take off - I swear, I don't know what I'm doing wrong when it comes to aft pitching surfaces. I assume it has something to do with the torque the damn things ostensibly provide and my problem is that my tailplane isn't big enough; I am putting them well aft and above the CoM. Screenies would help, I know; I have them, I just...well, I already told y'all what happened there. A more fundamental understanding of rotational kinematics probably would help too - the Rocket Equation and linear kinematics I can do no sweat but when you throw in a cosine my brain goes absolutely bonkers. Anyways, I did include an ejection system, and Wilful got to test it out. Worked. Capsule spun like nobody's business on the way down before the chute deployed, but it did work...

[Aegrim]

Starting to put together my most faithful JIMO craft ever. This mission was a personal favourite of mine and I'm still upset it was canceled.

Here it is folded up for launch

 

Here it is unfolded.

I need to find a way to get the mapping radar to work with the stock size real solar system mod, then it's off to Jupiter last stop Europa.

[Sharpy]

1 hour ago, capi3101 said:

You should give it a good, lucky spacecraft name. You know, like Titanic, or Nostromo, or Event Horizon, or Palomino, or.......or............(crap, I can't think of any other movies off the top of my head where the spaceship ultimately blows up or meets with some kind of disaster).

Instead of starship names, I looked up sea oil tanker names I'll call her Spirit.